This one includes the real images for the new achievements (many thanks to community member nas1m for working on these!) and a single small bugfix for the shotgun.

Steam integration for the new achievements will come soon, and won't require a further client-side update.

And that will mark the end of the 1.1 cycle. Hopefully another beta cycle will start breaking things again soon, but either way 1.1 should be a good stable version for folks to enjoy until it's time for another official.

1.017 marks the official release of the improvements from 8 separate beta releases, including:

* New optional "Conducts" such as the much-requested "Dead Is Dead" (losing an exo is permanent) to the relentless "On Your Toes" (you only get 5 seconds to pick your next action in missions).

* Massive rebalancing of the bot population logic so you don't run into 50 DoomBots in a single mission, and significant rebalancing of bot stats themselves (there's a lot less bullet-sponge-syndrome going on). The logic where the AI picks which bot types to upgrade between missions is now more consistent in the amount of agony it causes you. On the other hand, the Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty levels are all harder (with Casual, Expert, and Misery mostly retaining their previous positions on the pain-scale).

* The Volatizer and the Shotgun have had their AOE patterns re-imagined to be more interesting and useful. And AOE in general has been heavily revised to make more sense (explosions no longer propogate to nearby rooms as if the walls weren't there at all, etc).

* It's now much easier to mod many of the game's graphical aspects.

Many thanks to the players for the feedback that prompted most of these changes. The specific changes (and the players primarily to blame for causing each new refinement of suffering) are listed here.

Arcen, purveyors of sundry indie oddities, sent a message by pigeon post in the early hours of this morning to inform us of their new game, The Last Federation. It has one of the finest single line pitches I’ve ever encountered – “The Last Federation is a Grand Strategy + RTS Tactics game” – and in honour of the good news that she delivered, the pigeon has now been promoted to Flight Lieutenant and provided with a suitable cap. TLF places players in the role of a mercenary leader in a procedurally generated galaxy, which contains eight alien races to menace and manipulate. The closest point of comparison may well be Soldak’s Drox Operative. Arcen’s pigeon also told us that the spiffing AI War is on sale this weekend, with the complete collection (five DLCs) available for $4.25 and the little blighter didn’t stop there. More news – and a couple of videos – below.

This one is our first non-beta-branch update to Bionic Dues since it released, and so it comes with a plethora of goodies from 1.001 on upwards in the release notes linked above.

The biggest thing, by far, are the improvements to the customization interface. The game supports a minimum resolution of 1024x720, and so our previous customization interface basically adhered to that at the expense of using the screen space of larger resolutions. Now on resolutions that are 1280x768 or higher, you get a new and easier-to-use customization interface that combines a number of functions into one screen. If you prefer the old interface for some reason, there is a settings option that lets you re-enable that.

A number of balance improvements are also in this version. Sentry turrets are no longer OP. Groups of ClawBots are no longer death on wheels. Tuck now has an improved special ability. And the pistol has been buffed quite a bit. Among other things.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that Steam will automatically download for you. However, if you want to force a quicker update and are currently running Steam, just restart Steam.

Five minutes of Bionic Dues was almost enough. I was attracted by turn-based tactical mech combat but swiftly repelled by confusion and comedy voiceovers. I quit. Later, just before bed, I decided to try again, reasoning that while Arcen may not be on a winning streak, their games are usually more interesting than this one had seemed. I never did make it to bed that night. Here’s wot I think. >

"Hello everybody, a roguelike has just been released," is a sentence that that I could have written on any day of the last few months and still have it be accurate. There's been a lot of them, is what I'm saying. Not that it's a bad thing: personally, I'd rather this than endless waves of DotA-likes or, *shudder* tower defence. The latest is Bionic Dues, from AI War developer Arcen Games. It's a robo-roguelike featuring a seemingly unstoppable invasion and a lot of mechs.

I've only played it for a short while, but already it seems like a remarkably tactical and compulsive take on the roguelike genre. As a lone pilot of four hovering exosuits, you've fifty days to prepare for a full-scale assault on your HQ. Doing this requires you to select missions, which can either reduce the strength of the final assault, or give you better weapons and upgrades with which to improve your EXOs.

Once a mission is selected, you have to stalk through the turn-based mission corridors, killing robots, using special abilities, hacking chests and computers, and carefully trying to navigate the level in a way that gives you an advantage. Also you die a lot, because roguelikes.

Bionic Dues is out now. Normally it would cost £7/$10, but it's 25% off until October 15th.

Pablo has created a bonus (and really awesome) all-new music track for in missions in the game, called Recon. Next time the game updates in your steam client (and you can restart steam to force this), it will be added to your existing copy of the 1.0 version of the game.